10/16/2020
Read this piece from start to finish! It's an extremely important read about a fundamental right.
“There are many misperceptions of what ‘capacity to vote’ is,” said Charles Sabatino, director of the American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging. “Incapacity to follow a recipe and cook dinner doesn’t mean incapacity to vote. The inability to remember your grandchildren’s names doesn’t mean you can’t vote.”
What is required — as the commission and the Penn Memory Center point out in a new guide — is the ability to express a preference.
Workers in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, as well as family members, may refuse to assist impaired voters because they believe that dementia disqualifies them.
It doesn’t. A diagnosis of cognitive impairment does not bar someone from voting. Voters need pass no cognitive tests. They don’t have to be able to name the candidates or explain the issues. If they need help reading or physically marking the ballot, they can be assisted, either at the polls or with mail-in ballots. In some states, even people under court-appointed guardianship don’t lose their voting rights.
Voters need not complete the ballot; they can vote for president and ignore everything else. There is no time limit; a relative or paid caregiver can help the voter complete a mail-in ballot over several days. Write-ins are permitted. “If they tell you they want to vote for F.D.R., you write in F.D.R.,” Mr. Sabatino said.
“You may find it disturbing to write in someone odd, but we let people do that,” Dr. Karlawish said. Voters with normal cognition may write in the name of Mickey Mouse, select the first person on the ballot, whoever that might be, and otherwise behave less than rationally. “We can’t hold certain people to standards that we don’t hold everyone else to, when it’s a matter of a fundamental right,” Dr. Karlawish said.
Yes, you can help a cognitively impaired person participate in the election. But heed these two guidelines.
